Review:

While I can appreciate Pier Paolo Pasolini's artistry and vision, The Decameron is kind of a mess. Pasolini adapts eight stories from Boccaccio's novel and although he does maintain the essentials of the stories, they feel stripped down (much like most of the cast #BadJoke). These aren't necessarily the eight best stories or the most filmable stories, or even the most entertaining; it's eight stories with no real thread to connect them. Pasolini kind of uses a frame story (much different than the novels) but it doesn't lead from one story to another or create a narrative thread, it's just a single story told but by bit between the longer stories. As far as the stories themselves, everyone is terribly acted, painfully unfunny, and at least 80% ADR. I don't speak Italian, so I had subtitles on and I was still much more focused on how poorly the sound matched the characters' lips. I'm not sure what the deal is, but almost the entire movie is ADR and it's awful, the most egregious example being a scene with a boys' choir where I looks like Pasolini just told the kids "I don't care what you are saying, just keep your mouth moving and don't stop!" so their mouths don't match the song and each kid is clearly doing his own thing. They'll be holding a long note and a kid in the corner is comping his teeth. It's a shame because Pasolini has many beautiful shots, but the entire movie feel like if you hired an A-List director to run your fourth grade musical; visually, I can see that he knows what he's doing, but no one else does. Honestly, if he'd cut the number of stories in half, hired actual actors, and re-shot scenes instead of dubbing over them afterwords, we could have a masterpiece.